Moments out of Time

* At the movies, Roma: German slapstick on screen in deep distance, a pair of lovers in closeup silhouette in left of frame, gray ranks of anonymous filmgoers in between. The space is familiar, auspicious, yet somehow fraught. Camera does not move, but things come undone….* “I felt like I was Jacob wrestling all night long with the angel, fighting in the grasp. Every sentence, every question, every response a mortal struggle. It was exhilarating.” Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke), First Reformed…* Leave No Trace: the myriad intonations and valences Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie can get into “Dad”…* Pirandellian rewrite: At the outset of The Other Side of the Wind—begun 1970, completed 2018—Peter Bogdanovich speaks with old-age voice…. * The Death of Stalin: body tumbling down stairs in background as Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) makes his rounds…* Hereditary: rooms that suggest dollhouse miniatures, and may be… * Filial love in You Were Never Really Here: Joe’s honkhonk honk mock hammering of Mom; Joaquin Phoenix and Judith Roberts…* The endless, obscuring, occasionally decapitating frames of civilization in Zama; maddening protocols and deflections…* The Old Man and the Gun: Forrest/Robert Redford’s “yeah it’s for real” shrug after slipping note to bank teller…* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling) catching snowflakes in his mouth…* Lisa (Regina Hall) almost falling asleep in the midday sun—Support the Girls…* Widows: Dog in arms blinks as Veronica (Viola Davis) enters husband’s workshop….* If Beale Street Could Talk: moving “furniture” in the loft…* Bohemian Rhapsody: cats in window watching Freddie’s limo leave for the concert…* Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) petting a rabbit while having her hair brushed—The Favourite…* Michael Myers mask rising out of car trunk—Halloween…* Border: yearning through windowglass—werewolves in love?…* A Quiet Place: Creature that can’t see and one who can’t hear pass in the night….* “Being dead” up on the roof, Roma…* “Go for a cruise,” the horseman proposes, and his steed breaks into fluid glide, camera tracking right along. Brady Jandreau, The Rider…

Brady Jandreau in ‘The Rider’

* “Shoot her before him and make sure he sees it.” Beria’s instructions for disposition of politically superfluous married couple—The Death of Stalin…* Recurrently in First Reformed, the sound of footsteps on bare wooden floors. Such sense of place, community, ethos…* Private Life punctiliousness: “The seltzer comes from one place, the syrup from somewhere else.”…* Blake Lively to Anna Kendrick post-sudden-kiss, A Simple Favor: “You’re OK. You wanna order pizza?”…* The Little Drummer Girl: in mid-interrogation, need 50p to turn lights on again…* The Favourite: “Must the duck be here?”…* Film freak: “I’m Marvin P. Fassbinder!” Jake Hannaford/John Huston: “Of course you are.” The Other Side of the Wind…* Bad Times at the El Royale: Far across rainswept parking lot, Jon Hamm’s glasses reflect lightning….* Small plane like a dragonfly over arctic waste, Hold the Dark… * November, an Estonian ghost story: flying skull carries cow over treetops…* The reservoir and what might be in it—Burning…* Dying man singing along to ambient music; his killer lying down beside him and joining in—You Were Never ReallyHere…* Hereditary: papers blowing out through backseat window just before … you know…* Bird Box: Woman steps into blazing car and takes her seat….* Les Affames/Ravenous: cow eating lawn along suburban street…* Zama: squeak of native-operated wood fan behind ambiguous flirtation…* Candles on railing of borrowed porch, Leave No Trace…* BlacKkKlansman: Flip (Adam Driver) and other cops turning as they hear Ron (John David Washington) on the phone listing all the types of nonwhite Americans he hates…* Motherhood is hard. “I am so sick of that face on your face!” Toni Collette, Hereditary…* “So grandma only wanted their money, not me?” Could be, kid. Then again, what’s family anyway? Shoplifters…

Shoplifters

* Roma: Seriously stressed Galaxie pulls into frame below Aztec entablature….* All the good doctors in Moscow having been liquidated, how to get medical assistance for Stalin? Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) rationalizes: “If he recovers, then we got a good doctor, and if he doesn’t recover, then we didn’t, but he won’t know!” The Death of Stalin settles that….* Night Eats the World: man contemplates suicide, nods off, accidentally discharges shotgun in his sleep….* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: creak of Leone windmill that isn’t there…* Gray church, gray sky, gray dusk—First Reformed…* The Old Man and the Gun: Forrest, horseback on hilltop, watching caravan of cop cars on road below…* Torch-bearing riders spread into the night, The Favourite….* Pact under red umbrella, If Beale Street Could Talk…* “I can take fuckin’ up all day but I can’t take not trying”—Support the Girls values… * The Sisters Brothers: riding through cemetery of discarded luggage on seashore…* A scattering of rocks in a green graveyard: rough memorials for Border’s deformed dead…* The Rider: Cat Clifford’s talking prayer by campfire…* The food no one ever gets to eat in You Were Never ReallyHere, until someone does…* “Kentucky Fried Chicken—in Kentucky! When’s that gonna happen?” Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) open to delight, Green Book…* Llama kibitzes at dashing of Zama’s (Daniel Giménez Cacho) hopes…

Daniel Giménez Cacho in ‘Zama’

* Vigil in rain with two geese—Happy as Lazzaro…* The grandmother at the beach, setting about dying. The late Kirin Kiki, Shoplifters…* John Carroll, Norman Foster, Tonio Selwart; shades tenderly at large in The Other Side of the Wind…* Burning: The bewitching Haemi (Jun Jong-seo) slips out of her shirt to dance in the warm light of a setting sun; two young men watch (Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun), curiously impassive….* The towering blond distraction of Elizabeth Debicki, Widows…* Kayli Carter’s misconstrued “OK,” Private Life. (Watch this young actress. And, to be sure, Thomasin McKenzie.)…* The Favourite: Emma Stone’s imposing lexicon of sniffles, snorts, head wags…* Zoe Kazan as Miss Longabaugh … Has Sarah Vowell seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs?… * Cabiria-like, the unsought power to balance on one foot: Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) at the martial arts field, Roma…* Night run through corn shocks, A Quiet Place…* Leave No Trace: Truck driver (Art Hickman) who has to know he’s doing the right thing…* The Armstrongs’ laughter at “kinda neat,” First Man…* Touching the nose, A Star Is Born…* Ants crawling over head as oblivious motorists drive past, Hereditary…* Elder doctor pursued across white plaza, The Death of Stalin…* Rooftop sleepwalk under full moon, November…* The Quake: shattered skyscraper like a tyrannosaur profile…* Nocturnal greeting from/to reindeer, Border…* Cold Skin: mermen climbing down off lighthouse in first rays of sun…* First Man: Pre-launch, bird flies past porthole….* “You’re starting to harsh both of our mellows”—Sorry to Bother You…* “You know you’ve missed me.” The return of Frank Underwood. Kevin Spacey on YouTube. OMG….* Zama: coy menace of Vicuña Porto (Matheus Nachtergaele)…* Ron’s karate-chop war dance in front of Records counter, BlacKkKlansman…* The Old Man and the Gun: Tom Waits’s reminiscence about why he hates Christmas…* Bad Times at the El Royale: Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and the right/wrong jukebox tune: “you’re just too good to be true”…* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: the Impresario (Liam Neeson) walking back from the gorge…* “She died. Or maybe she didn’t die. Maybe she just moved back to the suburbs.“ Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) can’t be expected to remember everything. Can You Ever Forgive Me?…

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’

* Eighth Grade: Dorky father (Josh Hamilton) wants to “say one thing.” She (Elsie Fisher): “Dad, this is more than one thing.” He: “It’s a chunk of things.”…* “Same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me”—Leave No Trace….* Dog running out to chase truck, Les Affames/Ravenous. Life goes on, even in zombie apocalypse.…* The Favourite: hand job disquisition on realpolitik…* Avengers: Infinity War: Dr. Strange saying douchebag…* Brotherhood of the toothbrush—The Sisters Brothers…* In Support the Girls, stormin’ Cubby (James LeGros) popped in stomach. Did not see that coming…. * HoldtheDark: Offered soup, sorely wounded Slone (Alexander Skarsgard) asks, “What kind?”…* President Pierce’s accommodation to change, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs…* Park Chan-wook’s red and green rooms, The Little Drummer Girl…* What rough beast sinks into the depths with its tender burden—You Were Never ReallyHere…* A Star Is Born: Ally’s final, hieratic closeup; Lady Gaga indeed…* Wig? No wig? Sharon (Regina King) calculates her best approach in Puerto Rico. If Beale Street Could Talk…* “Has anybody got a Swiss Army knife?”—First Man…* Somewhere Don Gabriel Figueroa smiles: in Roma, thundercloud light on cactus as mommy drives her family home from vacation….* Schrader’s use of the classical 1.33:1 format in First Reformed: initially startling; effective at setting the tone of austerity; then disconcerting as, what, the whole film is going to be in this shape? Yes, and rightly so….

First Reformed

* Hulk towering darkly above parkway, bisecting Scope frame—You Were Never Really Here…* Cliff fall without end—Happy as Lazzaro…* Zama: ambush by red-painted phantoms amid the long grass…* Outlaw King: apples rolling in the road under horses’ hooves…* Molly Shannon murdering roast turkey, Private Life…* Daniel Kaluuya, stone cold malevolence in Widows…* “First time?” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs…* Hereditary: house swallowed in night, silver tree trunks shining above…* Atavistic thrill of that music coming on as Michael Meyers once again walks the streets of Haddonfield—but there’s still only one Halloween…* Border: smelling smartphone…* Cellphone call among tombstones, First Reformed…* Kid in hospital to fellow survivor of 22 July: “Cigarettes would be nice … except I don’t smoke.”…* Hold the Dark: Vernon reclaiming cigarette from windowsill after killing rapist…* Erramentari: torment by chick pea…* Apostle: the silhouettes around “the purification”…* Car painted pink by neon sign, Bad Times at the El Royale…* Suicide in white lake amid white trees, November…* Sarah (Golshifteh Farahani) appears to have won approval of zombie Alfred (a new frontier for Denis Lavant)—Night Eats the World….* The Death of Stalin: breathtaking precision of comedic ensemble…* Unsettling, unexpectedly heartbreaking memento mori: in The Favourite, Olivia Colman’s final closeup, the Queen’s voice the slurry growl of a stroke victim…* “Cut” (The Other Side of the Wind). “Shantih Shantih Shantih” (Roma). Things Netflix didn’t want you bothered by…* Apollo 1 mission: the two shots of the cockpit hatch—First Man…* Ferocity of the Cheeon shootout, Hold the Dark (Julian Black Antelope as Cheeon)…* Emily Blunt cocking a pump shotgun, A Quiet Place…

Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds in ‘A Quiet Place’

* Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Parting after dinner, the shy dynamics of Lee (Melissa McCarthy) and Anna (Dolly Wells) wordlessly wondering what this might lead to…* Burning: The cat with no name has one….* Queen passing offstage, leaving the screen to the vast crowd. Bohemian Rhapsody…* You Were Never Really Here: suicide skip on the check. “Have a nice day.”…* Profile, pirogue, endless carpet of green—Zama…* Seahorse frond, Leave No Trace…* “Whistle for him when you walk away, please”—The Rider….* The Death of Stalin: furtive glances of the next men in line who suddenly, inexplicably, just avoided getting executed…* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs reaches its destination, the prairie precursor of the Hotel Earle….* Roma’s transcendent final shot. Stay for the last plane….

RTJ wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Kathleen Murphy to this year’s edition.

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films

* Death notice at hockey practice, Manchester by the Sea: at a distance, the rhythms of bruised recognition and awkward sympathy…

* Thrilling camera follow in Hell or High Water as the brothers Howard race home from the first bank heist. Then, after a moment, a capper: crane up to see the ditch prepared to receive getaway car…

* Things to Come: Riding on bus, weeping after learning of her mother’s death, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) sees her ex-husband (André Marcon) walking on the sidewalk with the new woman in his life, and bursts into laughter….

* Elle: Michèle’s (Isabelle Huppert) reaction to her mother’s bombshell that she intends to marry her boy toy: half tickled and wholly appalled…

Rummaging in cartons on the top floor of our house—a process that has gone and will go on for years—I recently found two crumbling pieces of newsprint that mark, among other things, the beginning of what became “Moments out of Time.” The “Moments” stuff comes at the end, the entries for any given film clumped together. Only a few anticipate the way such things would be composed in later years. Still, I’d like to enter them into the Parallax View record.

While I’m at it, please indulge the year-end remarks which precede them. (The venue was the counterculture weekly Helix, which expired not long afterward.) Seattle film year 1969 was a remarkably rich time, not least for the fact that it included some local and/or personal premieres from the preceding five decades of cinema. And happily coincident with a landmark restoration this current film year is my top choice for 1969, the year it first played in the greater Seattle area. —RTJ

[Originally published in Helix, January 15, 1970]

’69: A GOOD YEAR (for movies…)
by Dick Jameson

It’s a few minutes past Ten Best time again, and while I’m usually champing at the bit preparing tentative lists as early as November, this year I held off. Not that movies were less interesting in Seattle in 1969. Movies were too interesting. Trying to cull ten titles out of the wealth of fine films making their first appearance in Seattle last year is a hellish prospect, and maybe a leetle bit impossible.

So I sympathize with Johns Hartl and Voorhees of the Times, who made it easier on themselves by limiting eligibility only to released-in-1969 pictures. That does make things a lot easier; I can manage that standing on one hand:

• It Follows: A classroom reading of “Prufrock”—”and in short I was afraid”; old woman seen slowly approaching across schoolyard…
• In Bridge of Spies, Jim Donovan (Tom Hanks) instructing CIA man Hoffman (Scott Shepherd) on what makes them Americans: “the rule book”…
• The head-scratching guys, Spotlight: Marty (Michael Keaton) post-golf and Mike (Mark Ruffalo) post-run, beginning to have a sense of how big the story might get…
• Indian stepping straight out of dark screen into firelight, The Revenant…
• Timbuktu: walking through haze glare of sun while getting away from the suddenly dead Amadou…
• Carol: steam off the road caught in headlights at night…
• A fetal form curled up in bright green grass, the little boy (Jacob Tremblay) who has just fallen out of his Room into a great ocean of world…
• An exquisitely manufactured Eve (Alicia Vikander) contemplates iterations of her own visage, displayed on her creator’s wall in Ex Machina….
• Tour-de-force directing and acting in Clouds of Sils Maria: Maria (Juliet Binoche) running lines with Valentine (Kristen Stewart), the two slipping back and forth between the dynamics of the script and their relationship, between roleplaying in and for Oliver Assayas’s movie and acting out as themselves…Keep Reading

We perpetrated the first “Moments Out of Time” in ecstasy over the cinematic splendors of 1971—The Conformist, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, et al. It ran in our Seattle Film Society journal Movietone News (“The trees creaking in the wind: the murder in The Conformist…“), where it became a much-anticipated annual feature ’til the journal wrapped in 1981. We’ve missed memorializing a few years since, but have enjoyed at various times the hospitality of Film Comment, American Film, Steadycam, Movies/MSN, and Cinephiled. A comprehensive “Moments” library is maintained at Parallax-View.com.

SQÜRL’s banshee screech, “Funnel of Love,” over the first ravishing images—including turntable as flat circle of time—of Only Lovers Left Alive…

“I was once considered a great beauty,” confides Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), concierge extraordinaire, The Grand Budapest Hotel….

A dollhouse town and the relentless cheer of a minister’s wife (Meryl Streep), on the edge of the crazy-making emptiness of the American frontier, The Homesman…

What to say, politely, to an Iraqi woman after your team has burst into her Fallujah home? “Hello….” Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, American Sniper…

Birdman: After Mike (Edward Norton) blows up the performance, Riggan (Michael Keaton) storms offstage snarling, “Get him out of here!” Annie the P.A. (Merritt Wever) softly asks, “How do you want me to do that?”….

Threesome rocking out to “Gloria” on car radio: a rare communal moment of joy in Two Days, One Night…

The Better Angels: Abraham Lincoln’s second mother (Diane Kruger) balances on one foot, wavering over a fallen tree trunk, the sun blazing a bright halo around her head….

In Exodus: Gods and Kings, a tiny white stallion, rearing beneath a heavens-high curve of tsunami….

‘Foxcatcher’

Foxcatcher: To celebrate her dying, John du Pont (Steve Carell) drives his mother’s stable of prized horses out into the cold….

Roads in mist, Blue Ruin…

As Force majeure’s vacationers trek down an alpine highway, their long walk imperceptibly morphs out of the everyday into a Bergmanesque pilgrims’ progress….

Mocking fellow painter John Constable’s fussing over a tiny brushstroke of red in a packed canvas,Mr. Turner(Timothy Spall) casually rubs a smear of scarlet into the merest suggestion of a buoy in one of his impressionistic seascapes….

On some other planet, what looks like a towering cliff becomes a frame-filling wall of water bearing down on Interstellar’s astronauts….

Hilarious chest-baring, acrobatic hoofing all over a picturesque waterfall, by a pair of princely twits (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) warbling about the “Agony” of love, Into the Woods…

‘The Skeleton Twins’

The Skeleton Twins: the decisive moment when Maggie’s—and by all means Kristen Wiig‘s—lips begin to twitch, and she gives herself up to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” as joyously lipsynched and boogied to by brother Milo (Bill Hader)…

Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) contemplating a curl of cream in a cup of coffee, The Theory of Everything…

Guy Pearce bringing it as The Rover: Is he gonna shoot that old woman in the face? … No, he wouldn’t … wouldn’t shoot that old woman in the face … Oh good, he’s putting the gun away … Oh. Just changing hands…

‘The Rover’

Conferring elbow to elbow with Monsieur Jean; Jude Law and Jason Schwartzman early in The Grand Budapest Hotel…

An old seadog (Michael Parks) spins a wicked-strange story about an intimate encounter with a walrus, in Tusk….

The visceral horror of Maleficent’s (Angelina Jolie) rape-castration: stumps where wings once grew…

Headboard as gravemarker for eleven-year-old girlchild, tilting over in the middle of nowhere, The Homesman…

Under the Skin: in a backcountry Scottish town, a girl (Scarlett Johansson) in maroon shirt walking down grey road made perpendicular by perspective…

After the last slippery coming and going of “Dr. Faust” (Tom Hiddleston’s Adam) at the hospital blood bank, Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright) opines, “Cat gotta be from Cleveland.”—Only Lovers Left Alive…

TheHobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: Galadriel’s (Cate Blanchett) chilling transformation, in closeup, from ethereal elf into berserker-demon…

Leviathan: Outside the window that has landmarked so much of the film, beyond a kitchen table still cluttered with homely dishware, the bucket of a steam shovel rises into view, swings with the languor of a grazing cow, and demolishes a home, the last vestige of shattered family, and any relic of what passed for social order….

Heartstopping materialization of a giant arachnid in Enemy‘s toxic-yellow world…

The Homesman: Mary Bee Cuddy (Hillary Swank), bending to slip naked into George Briggs’s sleeping bag: “Don’t make me lose any more of my dignity.”…

Coitus interruptus, in Under the Skin, when a not-entirely-human (Scarlett Johansson) leaps to aim a flashlight between her legs, shocked to discover a way something might get inside her…

Late in Edge of Tomorrow (now commercially retitled Live Die Repeat), the general (Brendan Gleeson) and the audience more or less simultaneously catch on that Cage (Tom Cruise) and Rita (Emily Blunt) have been here before….

Birdman: Starting to play mad scene after finding his wife in bed with a guy, Riggan notices Mike has a raging hard-on. Theater audience notices, too….

Unbroken: after the strafing, underwater view of life rafts against the sky, light showing through bullet holes…

What happens on that beach, Under the Skin, and the kinds of sense it doesn’t make…

Blue Ruin: color horizontals of a carnival at night…

Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), spread out on his recliner, reminiscing about the days when he was somebody—The Drop…

Love Is Strange: Aging lovers, too long apart, spoon in the bottom deck of a bunkbed….

Boyhood’s gutsy mom (Patricia Arquette) abruptly overwhelmed at life passing her by: “I thought there would be more.”…

George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) and other assorted dregs jigging to fiddle music on a river-raft, slowly swallowed up in darkness, The Homesman…

In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam and Eve lean in the doorway of a Tangier dive, drinking in Yasmine Hamdan’s unforgettable performance of Moroccan blues….

Monsieur Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel: “There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”…

Under the Skin: small quick blaze in snowy woods…

Kathleen Murphy has written about movies for most of her life (Movietone News, Film Comment, Steadycam, MSN/movies.com, et al.), curated film festivals (Women and Cinema, Irish Cinema) and taught film at University of Washington.

Veteran film critic Richard T. Jameson served as editor of the journals Movietone News (1971-1981) and Film Comment (1990-2000).

We perpetrated the first “Moments Out of Time” in ecstasy over the cinematic splendors of 1971—The Conformist, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, et al. It ran in our Seattle Film Society journal Movietone News (“The trees creaking in the wind: the murder in The Conformist…“), where it became a much-anticipated annual feature ’til the journal wrapped in 1981. We’ve missed memorializing a few years since, but have enjoyed at various times the hospitality of Film Comment, American Film, Steadycam, Movies/MSN, and Cinephiled. A comprehensive “Moments” library is maintained at Parallax-View.com.

• Cellophane wrapper lately crushed in a monster’s fingers uncrimps on the counter as Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) teaches a gas station owner (Gene Jones) to appreciate what a remarkable quarter has entered his life: No Country fir Old Men….

• Flags of Our Fathers: how the whole movie is suspended between the desperate “Where is he?” and finding out who “he” is…

• The calm, ecstatic beauty of the opening shot of A Prairie Home Companion: Mickey’s Dining Car glowing in the night, the turned back of narrator Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) visible through the window as he finishes his cheap meal, pays, and rises to step out into a heartland street painted with light and color after rain…

• Business-as-usual in TheDeparted: Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) disappears into a back room for a while. When he comes back to reenter the conversation, he’s wearing a bloody apron. We never know why….

• HalfNelson: Ryan Gosling’s heroin-addicted teacher storms into the drug-dealer’s hangout to tell the charismatic fellow (Anthony Mackie) to stay away from a little girl he’s taken under his wing–and gets detoured by the lure of shooting up….

• A lively mandrake root swims in a pan of milk beneath a pregnant woman’s bed—Pan’sLabyrinth…

• Inside Llewyn Davis: Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) sits by in the Village club, uninvited, as “500 Miles” is performed by Jim & Jean (Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan) and Troy (Stark Sands). You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles….
• The opening thirteen-minute shot of Gravity, during which you never think about special effects because everywhere you look, it’s real…
• The straight backroads of Nebraska. Doesn’t hurt to have those black cattle standing in the widescreen distance under a leaden sky….
• The curve of a tree limb above two lovers (Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux) embracing on a park bench, in Blue Is the Warmest Color…
• The first time the ladies set eyes on each other, American Hustle. Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) to Sydney (Amy Adams) and then to husband (Christian Bale): “I know who you are! I know who she is, Irving!”…
• The peculiarly pastel density of the air in which Her’s islanded Angelenos swim…
• The fat gray worms of industrial smoke — especially from ground-hugging trains — that trail across Miyazaki’s green world in The Wind Rises…
• The Counselor: Leopard (Cameron Diaz) contemplates lamb (Penélope Cruz): “What a strange world you live in.”…
• Sternbergian ballet: the duel between Ip Man (Tony Leung) and Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) at The Grandmaster’s last train stop…
• Post-coitus in Enough Said, Albert (James Gandolfini) wondering whether he’s too heavy for his diminutive lover (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); enough to break your heart…
• At the beginning of Before Midnight, the look on Ethan Hawke’s face as his kid goes to board the plane…Keep Reading

• Asleep in a balcony seat at the top of some golden-age movie palace, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is brought a telephone: The Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd) is calling from England….

• In Lincoln, the magnetic clasp of hands at the moment Stanton (Bruce McGill) and Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) finally receive news about a crucial battle…

• Late-night diner schmooze between two battered hockey “enforcers,” one rising (Seann William Scott), one in decline (Liev Schreiber)—Goon…

• Amour: a slap that, in small, shatters civilization…

• Shadows of passing soldiers flickering over the faces of Lincoln and Grant (Jared Harris) as they keep each other company on a roadside porch, post–Civil War carnage—Lincoln…

• Tarantino’s uncanny instinct for setup and suspension: in Django Unchained, the hilltop vantage on a man plowing a field, as two men (Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx) argue the merits of his extermination…

• Surveyed from a distance, on high, the track that connects Prometheus and the alien ship takes on a strange immanence: an umbilical link between “gods” and men….

• Barely glimpsed in Life of Pi: the shape of the eat-and-be-eaten island softens into the form of dreaming Vishnu….

• Tabu: In silent black-and-white, Portuguese colonials do the twist on a lawn in the middle of darkest Africa….

• The Home we must care for … Promised Land pauses to enjoy the pastoral magic of farm pond and hills as night comes on in Western Pennsylvania….

• Depending on your POV in The Deep Blue Sea: “This is a tragedy” … “Sad perhaps, but hardly Sophocles.”…

• “That’s it for me.” In The Grey, camera moves slowly in on Diaz (Frank Grillo), propped against a log, surveying magnificent forest, mountains, and what might be the big two-hearted river….

• “A lady from days gone by and a sad and melancholic crocodile,” keeping ghostly company in a moonlit jungle, Tabu…

• Odalisque with kitten: Eve (Kara Hayward) in her MoonriseKingdom…

• Tiffany’s (Jennifer Lawrence) one-word eloquence in Silver Linings Playbook: that “Hey!” grenade each time she ambushes Pat (Bradley Cooper), and her flat, deal-closed “OK” after his passionate declaration of love…

• ParaNorman‘s ringtone: the iconic theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween…

• While Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) hides from her demons under a pool table, the past starts to replay as a little girl’s legs suddenly dangle from table’s edge—SilentHouse…

• The Grey: A little girl’s long hair sweeps over a dying man’s face in benediction….

• End of Watch: Every sweet, raunchy conversation—the jazzy riffs of friendship—between cop brothers-in-arms (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña) as they cruise the mean streets of South Central…

• In Premium Rush, Michael Shannon as psycho cop Bobby Monday, nailing the kind of genial, even reasonable dementia that shrinks the world into his personal playpen; possibly American kin to Hans Landa…

• The prolonged demolishing of a man in a bathtub, The Snowtown Murders…

• Hope and Glory: Down among the green leaves of his family’s backyard garden, young Bill Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) confronts the wizard Merlin, while in the house the stillness of the adults ’round a grumbling radio signals that the Second World War has just been declared….

The Dead

• The Vietnamese woman’s voice scrapes relentlessly on our eardrums until we wish anything at all would shut her up: an unforgettable scene in Platoon makes us understand, by vicariously participating, how a My Lai might have happened….

• The Dead: Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) turns from the snowy window to discover that his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston), after the most intense and revealing conversation of their life together, has fallen deeply asleep….

• Barfly: Returning from the hotel bathroom down the hall, Henry (Mickey Rourke) sits on the bed and slowly begins to wonder why the music from his radio should sound so muted. Oh, right. He’s in the wrong room….

• The wind drifts leaves across the road as Gene Hackman’s car and the camera crest a rise together—Hoosiers….

• “I’m gonna tell you something, Bonanza is not an accurate depiction of the West”: earnest breakfast discourse in Tin Men…

• Diane Keaton singing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” New Year’s Eve 1943. Radio Days…

• Innerspace: Dennis Quaid sees his unborn child…

• On the battlefield at the end of Good Morning, Babylon, the dying brothers film each other in order that their sons will know what they looked like….

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Control (John Hurt), aced out of MI6 after the disaster in Budapest, announces, “Smiley is coming with me.” Smiley (Gary Oldman), his back to the camera, tilts his head a millimeter—surprise? acceptance? both?…

• The Descendants: the sound Matt King’s (George Clooney) flip-flops make on asphalt as he jogs over to his friends’ house to get the scoop on his dying wife’s infidelity…

• Three figures frozen on a green lawn, bathed in cold white light, from the moon and the planet Melancholia…

• Matchlight on face in front of red door, Le Havre…

• Upside-down shadows of kids at play on gray asphalt, swinging from the top of the frame in The Tree of Life…

• High angle looking down into cave in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: on the ochre floor, figures lie sleeping (dead?) just where radiant sunlight meets darkest shadow….

• The slow dissolve from one Western landscape into another, a slant of hill coming to exactly echo a line of clouds; actual and aspirant frontiers in Meek’s Cutoff…

• The breathlessly kinetic rhythms of the heist that begins Drive…

• Midnight in Paris: the evolution of the expression on Gil (Owen Wilson)—F. Scott Fitzgerald has just introduced him to Ernest Hemingway—from gobsmacked to go-with-the-flow delight…

• Peppy (Bérénice Bejo) and Valentin (Jean Dujardin) artlessly falling in love, as they dance through a series of takes: TheArtist…

• Moneyball: daughter (Kerris Dorsey) gravely, shyly singing “I’m Just a Little Bit Caught in the Middle” for dad (Brad Pitt) in the music store…

• The air in the village church swimming with dust particles that might once have been people: Lequattrovolte…

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: brusque, bone-shattering dispatch, by “Mr. Ellis” (Mark Strong), of the owl that has just flown out of the fireplace in his classroom…

• Laurel and Hardy in drag: Mr. Nobbs (Glenn Close), stiff as a stick, and broad-shouldered Mr. Page (Janet McTeer) step out in bonnets and dresses—AlbertNobbs…

• In MidnightinParis, Gil realizing that the woman he was just dancing with was Djuna Barnes: “No wonder she wanted to lead.”…

• Seduction, foreplay and climax on the subway: Shame…

• The Descendants: the sudden, vengeful kiss Matt King plants on the unknowing wife (Judy Greer) of hiswife’s lover…

• A very tipsy Emma Stone to “Photoshopped” Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love.: “We are going to bang!”…

• Shrinks Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) lying snug as bugs, or babies, in the belly of a boat with red sails, in A Dangerous Method…

• Closeup of British officer’s shining young face (Tom Hiddleston) as he promises to care for Joey, and bring him back to the boy who loves him: a singular moment of sincerity in War Horse that measures what a world war for nothing will cost…

• A black horse sinks down in slow motion, as though curtsying to oblivion—Melancholia…

• “Carrying, yeah”—Christoph Waltz’s first utterance in Carnage. Who ever doubted the worldly multilinguist of Inglourious Basterds could master American shrug?…

• A Nose (master perfumer) sniffs the aromas of time in a 32,000-year-old Cave of Forgotten Dreams….

• A shower of green leaves along a tree-lined residential street: something simian this way comes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes….

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), making a clean getaway after his incursion into the bowels of the Circus, passes Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) on the stairs and confirms from the tune he’s whistling that Peter’s phonecall moments before was monitored. As expected…

• In The Descendants, Matt’s quiet “Don’t ever do that again” after his daughter’s boyfriend (Nick Krause) embraces him…

• Over tea at the Pages, the only smile that ever unfreezes—and transfigures—the face of AlbertNobbs…

• A Scalphunter (Tom Hardy) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy caressing the face of the spy he loves with light reflected from a compact, while she (Svetlana Khodchenkova) takes her pleasure in the exposure…

• My Week with Marilyn: the look on the publican’s face when Miss Monroe (Michelle Williams) drops by the Dog & Duck to say, “Nice place you got here”; expertly summoned up by the great Jim Carter, and just as expertly dropped before the moment spoils…

• The way Home looks from down the street, an oasis of warm, golden light in the gloaming—The Tree of Life…

• The way Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) and the other women walk beside their Conestogas in Meek’sCutoff, as though they would go on forever, sans complaint, heroic pretension, or even imagination of another path, until they fall…

• Post-chemo, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dancing down a hospital corridor, oblivious to all but his own weed-fueled glee, in 50/50…

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams: the footprints of an eight-year-old boy and a wolf, side-by-side in the cave floor…

• In 50/50, mom (Anjelica Huston) and best bud (Seth Rogen) instantly ambushing Adam’s shrink (Anna Kendrick) when she shows up to wait out his life-or-death surgery: “I smother him because I love him!” … “I’m not a dick!”…